It's a warning more than a word: a reminder to women to adhere to sexual norms or be punished

Sandra Fluke
heard it when she talked about insurance coverage for birth control.
Sara Brown from Boston told me she was first called it at a pool party
in the fifth grade because she was wearing a bikini. Courtney Caldwell
in Dallas said she was tagged with it after being sexually assaulted as a
freshman in high school.

Many women I asked even said that it was not having sex that inspired a young man to start rumors that they were one.

And
this is what is so confounding about the word "slut": it's arguably the
most ubiquitous slur used against women, and yet it's nearly impossible
to define.

Leora Tanenbaum, the author of SLUT! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation,
told me that "a 'slut' is a girl or woman who deviates from norms of
femininity. The 'slut' is not necessarily sexually active – she just
doesn't follow the gender script."

This nebulous, unquantifiable
quality of the slur is what makes it so distressing – there's no way to
disprove something that has no conclusive boundaries to begin with. And
because it's meant to be more of an identity than a label, it's a term
not easily shaken off. "Slut" sticks to a person in a way that "asshole"
never will.

So what makes you a slut? It seems the the only hard and fast rule is that you have to be a woman.Men, of course, are immune – absent, really – from the frenzy of concern. For instance, a new study
out of the University of Michigan showed that teen girls who "sext" are
called sluts while boys who do the same remain free-from judgement. In
another example, the American Medical Association breathlessly released a study
in 2006 with the headline "Sex and Intoxication More Common Among Women
on Spring Break", intended to warn women about their "risky" behavior
while on break – but there was nothing about the men the majority of
these young women would supposedly be having all this drunken sex with.

by Robert C. KoehlerPublished on Thursday, June 26, 2014 by Common DreamsThe
video opens with a few bars of adrenalin-pumping music. We see a
topsy-turvy camera angle, sky, trees, darkness, then a staccato pop pop
pop that blends rhythmically with the music, but of course it’s gunfire,
lots of gunfire, followed by a few urgent words in Arabic, then
English. “Down here! Down here!”This chaotic excitement is Iraq,
the evening’s International Hot Spot, brought to us by ABC. It’s the
news, but it’s also reality TV and big league sports, rolled into an
entertainment package of shocking cluelessness. OMG, ISIS is on the
move. It’s winning. Stay tuned!

Iraq, Iraq. This is a disaster
stamped “made in USA.” Worse than that. It’s a bleeding stump of a
nation that we destroyed in our pursuit of empire, at the cost of
multi-trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands or perhaps a million
Iraqi lives, and spiritual and physical damage to American troops so
profound a new phrase had to be coined: moral injury. And now, our
official, moneyed media serve up what’s left of Iraq to us as
geopolitical entertainment: the moderates (our guys, sort of) vs. the
insurgents. Go, U.S.-trained troops! Stand tough and die for American
interests, OK?

Of course, as the Washington Post reported earlier
this month: “Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),
an al-Qaeda offshoot, overran the western bank of the city (of Mosul)
overnight after U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers and police officers
abandoned their posts, in some instances discarding their uniforms as
they sought to escape the advance of the militants.”

This is our terrible baby, but hear the words of another Washington Post story:

“For
both sides,” write Gregg Jaffe and Kevin Maurer, referring to sides
within the U.S. military, “the debate over who lost Iraq remains raw and
emotional. Many of today’s military officers still carry fresh memories
of friends killed in battle.”

They add, however: “Iraq and the
Iraqi people remain something of an abstraction. For much of the war,
U.S. troops patrolled Iraq’s cities in lumbering armored vehicles and
lived on heavily fortified bases surrounded by blast walls and barbed
wire.”

Why do even small towns now deploy paramilitary forces?

For
nearly half a century, America’s police forces have undergone a process
of “militarization.” They've upped their cache of assault weapons and
military defense gear, increasingly deployed SWAT teams to conduct
ops-style missions on civilians, and inculcated a warrior attitude
within their rank. While major metropolitan areas have maintained SWAT
teams for decades, by the mid 2000s, 80 percent of small towns also had
their own paramilitary forces.

But beyond deep reporting of
individual journalists and scholars, little is known about the extent of
militarization across the country. The ACLU has attempted to bridge
that knowledge gap with a new report called War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.

“Our
investigation is the first to conduct an analysis using raw data
received directly from police departments, by looking directly at
incident reports themselves,” says Kara Dansky, Senior Counsel at the
ACLU’s Center for Justice and the primary author of the report. The ACLU
sent public records requests to 260 law enforcement agencies in 25
states plus Washington D.C., asking for records of all SWAT deployments
between 2011 and 2012. Below are some of its most significant findings.

1. The federal government’s war on drugs is the single greatest catalyst for local police militarization.

Far
from being used for emergencies such as hostage situations, the ACLU
found that 62% of all SWAT deployments were for the purpose of drug
searches, and 79% were to search a person’s home with a search
warrant—usually for drugs.

These deployments are usually violent
and feature bands of heavily armed officers ramming down doors or
chucking flash bang grenades into homes. Innocent people are often
caught up, and sometimes killed, in the ensuing chaos, including Eurie
Stamp, a Massachusetts grandfather who was shot dead by an officer as
police attempted to locate Stamp’s girlfriend’s son for a drug offense.
Other SWAT-induced tragedies abound: The ACLU found that 46 people were
injured as a result of paramilitary deployment.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page all played guitar with the
Yardbirds at different periods during the 1960s, making the Yardbirds
one of the most important rock and roll groups to come out of 1960s
England.

WikiLeaks published a previously tightly-held and secretive draft of a trade document
on Thursday that, if enacted, would give the world's financial powers
an even more dominant position to control the global economy by avoiding
regulations and public accountability.

Known as a Trade in
Services Agreement (TISA), the draft represents the negotiating
positions of the U.S. and E.U. and lays out the deregulatory strategies
championed by some of the world's largest banks and investment firms.According to WikiLeaks:

Despite
the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008
Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory
structures, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global
financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets
rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals –
mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into
other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also
shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data
flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial
data.

TISA negotiations are currently taking place outside of the
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the World Trade
Organization (WTO) framework. However, the Agreement is being crafted to
be compatible with GATS so that a critical mass of participants will be
able to pressure remaining WTO members to sign on in the future.
Conspicuously absent from the 50 countries covered by the negotiations
are the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The
exclusive nature of TISA will weaken their position in future services
negotiations.

Lori Wallach, director of Public
Citizen's Global Trade Watch, said the deal described in the draft, if
approved by national governments, would be a disaster for any regulatory
efforts designed to put a check on global finance.

“If
the text that was leaked today went into force, it would roll back the
improvements made after the global financial crisis to safeguard
consumers and financial stability and cement us into the extreme
deregulatory model of the 1990s that led to the crisis in the first
place and the billions in losses to consumers and governments.

"This
is a text that big banks and financial speculators may love but that
could do real damage to the rest of us. It includes a provision that is
literally called ‘standstill’ that would forbid countries from improving
financial regulation and would lock them into whatever policies they
had on the books in the past.”

_______________________________________

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At
3am on 28 May, Alecia Phonesavanh was asleep in the room she was
temporarily occupying together with her husband and four children in the
small town of Cornelia, Georgia. Her baby, 18-month-old Bou Bou, was
sleeping peacefully in his cot.Suddenly there was a loud bang
and several strangers dressed in black burst into the room. A blinding
flash burst out with a deafening roar from the direction of the cot.
Amid the confusion, Phonesavanh could see her husband pinned down and
handcuffed under one of the men in black, and while her son was being
held by another. Everyone was yelling, screaming, crying. “I kept asking
the officers to let me have my baby, but they said shut up and sit
down,” she said.

As the pandemonium died down, it became clear
that the strangers in black were a Swat team of police officers from the
local Habersham County force – they had raided the house on the
incorrect assumption that occupants were involved in drugs. It also
became clear to Phonesavanh that something had happened to Bou Bou and
that the officers had taken him away.

“They told me that they had
taken my baby to the hospital. They said he was fine he had only lost a
tooth, but they wanted him in for observation,” Phonesavanh said.

When
she got to the hospital she was horrified by what she saw. Bou Bou was
in a medically-induced coma in the intensive care unit of Brady Memorial
hospital. “His face was blown open. He had a hole in his chest that
left his rib-cage visible.”

The Swat team that burst into the
Phonesavanh’s room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic
commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by
domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device
called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind
suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had
landed in Bou Bou’s cot and detonated in the baby’s face.

“My son
is clinging to life. He’s hurting and there’s nothing I can do to help
him,” Phonesavanh said. “It breaks you, it breaks your spirit.”

Bou
Bou is not alone. A growing number of innocent people, many of them
children and a high proportion African American, are becoming caught up
in violent law enforcement raids that are part of an ongoing trend in
America towards paramilitary policing.

The 'rock star' economist sold out his London talk at the LSE – but his doomy prognosis isn't music to everyone's ears

With
all due respect to the "dismal science", this doesn't happen often:
hundreds of people are queueing round the block for an economics lecture
on a lovely summer's evening in London. And those are the people who
have successfully booked seats. There's another queue of shifty-looking
people hoping for return tickets and steeling themselves for
disappointment. This, one might well think, is a microcosm of the
dysfunctionally inegalitarian society under late capitalism that the
speaker indicts in his book: a society cruelly divided between the haves
and the have-nots.

And there are other
divisions: black and white, young and old, City suits and
flip-flop-sporting slackers, women and men, venerable baldies and
twentysomething asymmetric fringes, post-endogenous growth theorists and
their bitter foes, pre-post-endogenous growth theorists (sometimes
known as endogenous growth theorists). But the most emblematic social
division for our purposes is that between those in the queues who moan
loudly about being gouged by the merchandising ("£30 for a book? They've
got to be kidding. Who can afford that?") and those who've come
clutching one, sometimes two copies of Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, in the dewy-eyed hope that its author, Professor Thomas
Piketty, will deign to sign it. Piketty later apologises for not putting
the book online, saying it was because his publisher wouldn't like it:
if he was really serious about reducing inequality, though, you'd think
he'd ignore his publisher's compunctions.

Outside
the Peacock Theatre, round the corner from the London School for
Economics, the mood resembles an oversubscribed first night: it's
ostensibly genteel and polite, but hides simmering resentments that
could switch rapidly from sarcastic exchanges to elbow-shovings to
full-on riot followed by zombie apocalypse if we don't all get in.

Don't
these people know that they're queueing to hear about the historic
shifts in the capital-income ratio, modifications to the Kuznets curve
and the elasticity of substitution of labour? The counterintuitive
answer is that quite a lot of them do. For those who have lived through
austerity years that have made the rich richer and the poor more
desperate, for those who read Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The
Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better and
wondered how we could become more Nordically egalitarian, Piketty has a
message they want to hear: economics should be used for good rather than
evil, to effectively redistribute wealth. Pikettians don't chant, but
if they did it would go: "What do we want? An egalitarian shift in the
ratio between g and r, where r is growth and g the return on capital.
When do we want it? As soon as feasible, thanks."

A
look at only one subset of negative impacts of global warming - the
loss of vital coral reefs - would cost an estimated $11.9 trillion in
the coming years

Measure
the cost of destructive climate change-related impacts in the trillions
of dollars, says a United Nations report published Thursday.

The
report, which focuses on the world's 52 Small Island Developing States
(or SIDS) found predominantly in the Caribbean and the South Pacific,
highlights how the nations and people least responsible for the climate
crisis face the most severe damage. However, the report notes, the costs
associated with the destruction of low-lying nations, coral reefs, and
vulnerable coasts will be felt globally.

According to the UN's
Environment Program (UNEP), the coral reefs in all SIDS regions are
already severely impacted by rising ocean surface temperatures. And the
report says that the global net loss of the coral reef cover - around 34
million hectares over the coming two decades - will cost the
international economy nearly $12 trillion, with the economies and very
existence of those small nations especially impacted.

"For
example," said UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director
Achim Steiner, "these 52 nations, home to over 62 million people, emit
less than one per cent of global greenhouse gases, yet they suffer
disproportionately from the climate change that global emissions cause."

The
threats to low-lowing nations and those highly-dependent on their
proximity to ocean resources, according to the report, are increased
flooding, shoreline erosion, ocean acidification, warmer sea and land
temperature, and damage to infrastructure from extreme weather events.

The
UNEP reports says that though the challenges are enormous, there do
existence mitigation efforts that could lessen or forestall the worst
impacts, but only if governments quickly create new policies and change
course.

_____________________________________

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It's
not just about the distance between rich and poor, but about the gap
between what’s demanded by our planet and what’s demanded by our
economy.

by Noel Ortega Published on Wednesday, June 18, 2014 by Foreign Policy In FocusBy
now, it’s no secret that French economist Thomas Piketty is one of the
world’s leading experts on inequality. His exhaustive, improbably popular opus of economic history—the 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century—sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Some have called it the most important study of inequality in over 50 years.

Piketty
is hardly the first scholar to tackle the linkage of capitalism with
inequality. What sets him apart is his relentlessly empirical approach
to the subject and his access to never before used data—tax and estate
records—that elegantly demonstrates the growing trends of income and
wealth inequality. The database he has compiled spans 300 years in 20
different countries.

Exactingly empirical and deeply multidisciplinary, Capital is
an extremely important contribution to the study of economics and
inequality over the last few centuries. But because it fails to address
the real limits on growth—namely our ecological crisis—it can’t be a
roadmap for the next.

Inequality and Growth

One
of the main culprits of inequality, according to Piketty (and Marx
before him), is that investing large amounts of capital is more
lucrative than investing large amounts of labor. Returns on capital can be thought of as the payments that go to a small fraction of the population—the investor class—simply for having capital.

In
essence, the investor class makes money from money, without
contributing to the “real economy.” Piketty demonstrates that after
adjusting for inflation, the average global rate of return on capital
has been steady, at about 5 percent for the last 300 years (with a few
exceptions, such as the World War II years).

The rate of economic
growth, on the other hand, has shown a different trend. Before the
Industrial Revolution, and for most of our human history, economic
growth was about 0.1 percent per year. But during and after the rapid
industrialization of the global north, growth increased to a
then-staggering 1.5 percent in Western Europe and the United States. By
the 1950s and 1970s, growth rates began to accelerate in the rest of the
world. While the United States hovered just below 2 percent, Africa’s
growth rates caught up with America’s, while rates in Europe and Asia
reached upwards of 4 percent.

Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research
programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and
tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the
supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme
is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant
insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense
policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant
commands."Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative'
partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the
social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions
of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Among the
projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led
study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which
aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement
mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical
mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital
traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian
Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi
park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be
examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and
when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to
the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under
which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic
change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences."
The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on
"large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in
enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?'
which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of
political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they
do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly
sets out to study non-violent activists:

"In every
context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family,
cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage
in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed
militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed
groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently,
attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about
terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."

The
project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten
or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though
sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."

Sarah LazarePublished on Wednesday, June 11, 2014 by Common DreamsThe
public is up in arms after Canadian officials decided to prohibit
government weather forecasters from publicly discussing climate change.

As of Wednesday, nearly 14,000 people had signed a petition
penned by Canadian resident Janelle Martel that slams "another move on
the government’s part to keep the public uninformed about climate
change."

Environment
Canada spokesperson Mark Johnson told De Souza that Environment Canada
prohibits meteorologists from discussing climate change, citing the need
for them to speak to their "area of expertise."

But the petition,
created on the website of company Care2, charges, “These meteorologists
undergo years of training to learn about severe weather changes. This,
along with the fact that the government has barred other scientists from
discussing climate change without political clearance, makes it seem as
though the government [wants] to limit and control the information
Canadians have access to regarding climate change.”

_____________________

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Ever
wonder why, despite millions of personal anecdotes about pot's healing
effects, there is a stark lack of government-approved, clinical studies
to back up that human experience? The research gap is no accident.
Cannabis is the only illicit substance with an extra set of governmental
requirements specifically intended to prevent independent study.

While
medical marijuana patients in nearly half of the states swear by the
herb’s medicinal properties, prohibitionists can conveniently point
their fingers at that lack of scientific evidence whenever cornered by a
pro-legalization argument. Stacks of research
have affirmed the extraordinary potentials of the cannabis plant, but
none received the official approval of the U.S. government.

Hiding
behind these outdated prerequisites, the US Drug Enforcement
Administration has effectively blocked government approval of all
independent scientific studies on pot for four decades. Created in the
'70s as part of Richard Nixon's Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Prevention
Act of 1970, the DEA, a policing agency tasked with enforcing national
drug laws, has the authority to decide how each drug is restricted under
the law and whether/where it is produced. This has allowed the DEA to
restrict the production of cannabis allowed for federal research to the
point of near non-existence.

In a new report titled “ The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding and Rejecting Science,”
the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance teamed up with the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) to point out the many ways
in which the law enforcement agency stifles science.

“This
concerns me greatly as someone who has studied marijuana and given
thousands of doses of the drug,” said psychiatry professor Carl Hart
during a June 11 teleconference about the DEA report.Hart pointed
out the existence of government-funded studies showing “some potential
for marijuana” to help people with serious illnesses, for example HIV
and AIDS. “The notion that the DEA is has not acknowledged this and
thought about reconsidering the scheduling of marijuana just seems to be
against the scientific evidence,” he said. “It seems to be against what
we’re trying to do in terms of having a society that relies on
empirical evidence to base our decisions.”

by David SuzukiPublished on Wednesday, June 11, 2014 by Straight.comEnergy
giant Kinder Morgan was recently called insensitive for pointing out
that “Pipeline spills can have both positive and negative effects on
local and regional economies, both in the short- and long-term.” The
company wants to triple its shipping capacity from the Alberta tar sands
to Burnaby, in part by twinning its current pipeline. Its National
Energy Board submission states, “Spill response and cleanup creates
business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions,
and cleanup service providers.”

It may seem insensitive, but it’s
true. And that’s the problem. Destroying the environment is bad for the
planet and all the life it supports, including us. But it’s often good
for business. The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico added billions
to the U.S. gross domestic product! Even if a spill never occurred (a
big “if”, considering the records of Kinder Morgan and other pipeline
companies), increasing capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day
would go hand-in-hand with rapid tar sands expansion and more wasteful,
destructive burning of fossil fuels—as would approval of Enbridge
Northern Gateway and other pipeline projects, as well as increased oil
shipments by rail.

The company will make money, the government
will reap some tax and royalty benefits and a relatively small number of
jobs will be created. But the massive costs of dealing with a pipeline
or tanker spill and the resulting climate change consequences will far
outweigh the benefits. Of course, under our current economic paradigm,
even the costs of responding to global warming impacts show as positive
growth in the GDP — the tool we use to measure what passes for progress
in this strange worldview.

And so it’s full speed ahead and damn
the consequences. Everything is measured in money. B.C.’s economy seems
sluggish? Well, obviously, the solution is to get fracking and sell the
gas to Asian markets. Never mind that a recent study, commissioned by
the Canadian government, concludes we don’t know enough about the
practice to say it’s safe, the federal government has virtually no
regulations surrounding it and provincial rules “are not based on strong
science and remain untested.” Never mind that the more infrastructure
we build for polluting, climate-disrupting fossil fuels, the longer it
will take us to move away from them. There’s easy money to be had—for
someone.

We need to do more than just get off fossil fuels,
although that’s a priority. We need to conserve, cut back and switch to
cleaner energy sources. In Canada, we need a national energy strategy.
And guess what? That will create lasting jobs! But we must also find
better ways to run our societies than relying on rampant consumption,
planned obsolescence, excessive and often-pointless work and an economic
system that depends on damaging ways and an absurd measurement to
convince us it somehow all amounts to progress.

Author Rebecca Solnit admits that even penning a book titled 'Men Explain Things to Me' doesn't stop some men

Rebecca
Solnit is a prolific author (she's working now on her sixteenth and
seventeenth books), historian, activist and a contributing editor to
Harper's. Her most recent book, Men Explain Things to Me,
is a collection of Solnit's essays, including the title piece that
launched a million memes. Solnit, on the road in Seattle, took some time
to explain "mansplaining", writing and how the post-Isla Vista misogyny
conversation is a little like climate denialism.

JESSICA VALENTI: How do you feel about being considered the creator of the concept of "mansplaining"? Your now-famous essay
– which really gave women language to talk about the condescending
interactions they've had with men – certainly gave birth to the term,
but you write in the book that you didn't actually make up the word.

REBECCA
SOLNIT: A really smart young woman changed my mind about it. I used to
be ambivalent, worrying primarily about typecasting men with the term.
(I have spent most of my life tiptoeing around the delicate
sensibilities of men, though of course the book Men Explain Things to Me
is what happens when I set that exhausting, doomed project aside.) Then
in March a PhD candidate said to me, No, you need to look at how
much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience
every woman has but we didn't have language for.

And that's
something I'm really interested in: naming experience and how what has
no name cannot be acknowledged or shared. Words are power. So if this
word allowed us to talk about something that goes on all the time, then
I'm really glad it exists and slightly amazed that not only have I
contributed about a million published words to the conversation but
maybe, indirectly, one new word.

Do men still explain things to you?

Do
they ever! Social media are to mansplainers what dogs are to fleas, and
this recent feminist conversation has brought them out in droves. I
mean, guys explain ridiculous things to me like that the Louisiana Purchase
gave the United States a Pacific Coast. But more than anything since I
wrote Men Explain Things to Me, they've explained women's experience to
me and other women. With this explosive new conversation since the Isla Vista murders,
there's been a dramatic uptick in guys mansplaining feminism and
women's experience or just denying that we need feminism and we actually
had those experiences.

If there were awards to be handed out, one
might go to the man who told me and a woman friend that 1) women
actually like all those catcalls 2) as a man who's spent time in
men's-only locker rooms, he knows men don't actually speak to women that
way. So we like street harassment, but that doesn't actually
exist, because we're just crazy that way, us subjective, imaginative,
unreliable ladies. Just ask an expert. Who is not a lady.

During
his first presidential bid he promised to renegotiate the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), indicating some concern over the
U.S.-Canada-Mexico pact. A month after his 2009 inauguration, Obama
declared that he would “be very careful” and take his time meeting that goal.

Instead,
he crossed fixing that accord off his to-do list and became a
cheerleader for new deals that amount to NAFTA on steroids.

What’s the big deal?

The United States has inked free-trade deals with 20 countries
over the past three decades. This country plunged headfirst into the
World Trade Organization before it formally launched in 1995. It’s now
clear that this zeal benefits corporations while hurting the rest of us.

These accords stoke inequality by driving down wages. The United States exported nearly 700,000 jobs
between NAFTA’s 1994 debut and 2010, despite promises that it would
expand employment. Following 25 years of stagnation, typical household
income remains about $51,000 a year.

Free
trade deals hand corporations a shield to fend off national
regulations. Hitching its fortune to rules rigged by the Dominican
Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), a
Canadian-based mining company called Pacific Rim
claims to have a right to dig for gold in El Salvador — even though
that country has banned the practice to protect its meager supply of drinkable water.

Pacific Rim is suing El Salvador’s government for $300 million.

The
proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal could render this kind of
corporate power grab routine. The pact would skew global economic rules
for a dozen countries, including our own and Japan, which account for
40 percent of world trade. Among other things, this deal would make it
easier for corporations to use “investor-to-state” lawsuits like the El Salvador debacle to get their way over the objections of foreign governments.

This
recipe for ripoffs isn’t really about trade. And that’s the point.
These arrangements are a gimmick intended to trump local and national
laws to suit the whims of corporations.

That’s why merely five of the looming Trans-Pacific deal’s 29 “chapters” have much to do with trade. The rest hand big companies privileges and protections.

With
people taking a backseat to profits, it’s no wonder our leaders are
negotiating pacts like this behind closed doors. When WikiLeaks spilled
the beans on the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s environmental chapter, it
turned out that this deal included weaker safeguards than its predecessors, outraging people who spend their lives fighting for cleaner air and water.

The
Obama administration is also pursuing a Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP) with European nations. Those talks are
just as secret, and that pact would also make it easier for corporations
to override environmental safeguards by suing foreign governments to get their way.Why is WikiLeaks rooting around for these documents and releasing them to the public? The pacts will require Senate approval, yet lawmakers have had to beg
for any details about them. Based on leaks, other big concerns center
around health issues. For example, some provisions would block
government policies that discourage smoking. There are also many concerns about labor rights.

Meanwhile, hundreds of corporate insiders get a seat at the table without making a fuss. A list of 605 big-business insiders
leaked in 2012 offers a glimpse of the scope of this influence. It
includes industry-wide lobbyists like the American Farm Bureau and the
Nuclear Energy Institute, along with a who’s-who of corporate America.

Abbott
Laboratories, Caterpillar Inc., Walmart and Yum! Restaurants
International, the fast-food powerhouse that includes KFC, Pizza Hut,
and Taco Bell, all made the list while environmentalists and labor
leaders remain locked out.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies @ESGreco. OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org

Inequality changes who we are, individually and collectively.

How
do you decide who to marry, or whether to marry at all? How many
children to have? Whether to engage in short-term hookups or long-term
partnerships?

We don't like to think that economic forces outside
our individual control can shape the most intimate aspects of our lives,
like whether or not we wed, when to have kids, and what kinds of
families we create. But a growing body of evidence suggests that
inequality is changing not only American family structures, but the
roles men and women play and the calculations they make in pairing and
establishing households. Inequality changes who we are, individually and
collectively.

Inequality is changing the stakes for forming
partnerships. It means, for example that there are fewer men with stable
economic cicrumstances for women to choose from as appropriate
long-term partners at both the lower and middle rungs of the economic
ladder. A shortage of men in the less financially stable groups means
that the guys who do look like good prospects realize don't feel any
particular pressure to commit. So they don't. On the other hand,
working-class and poor women who consider marrying men who may get laid
off or become financial burdens are less ready to commit themselves.

At
the top of the economic ladder, conditions are quite different. There
people have resources to cope with childcare, good schools, therapy, and
other things that can help families succeed. More lasting commitments
and greater family stability go hand-in-hand with greater resources.

Law professors June Carbone and Naomi Cahn have been investigating how inequality influences family life. In their new book, Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family,
they find we are creating profound social changes through America's
tolerance of wealth and income disparities. In the New Gilded Age, class
once again becomes a dominant force in human life, just as it was
aboard the Titanic. In an email interview, I caught up with the authors to delve further into the new class-based American family.

When George W. Bush and the neocons launched their war in Iraq,
critics coined the slogan, “‘Iraq’ is Arabic for ‘Vietnam.’” The point
was obvious: Another long quagmire of a war in an inhospitable foreign
land would lead once again to nothing but death, suffering, and defeat
for America.That was back in 2003 and 2004, when the parallel was to the Vietnam war of 1965 – 1973.

To see why “Iraq” is still Arabic for “Vietnam” we have to turn the
historical memory dial back just a few more years, to 1962 and 1963.
That was when John F. Kennedy struggled with the same dilemma now facing
Barack Obama: How much, if it all, should we get involved militarily to
help a corrupt leader who stays in power by terrorizing his political
enemies?

Here’s what JFK told interviewers in September, 1963, about South
Vietnam under President Ngo Dinh Diem: “I don’t think … unless a greater
effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war
can be won out there.”

Here’s what Barack Obama told reporters
on June 13, 2014: “Iraq’s leaders have to demonstrate a willingness to
make hard decisions and compromises on behalf of the Iraqi people in
order to bring the country together. … and account for the legitimate
interests of all of Iraq’s communities, and to continue to build the
capacity of an effective security force.”

JFK: “In the final analysis it is their war. They are the ones who
have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment,
we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it.”Obama: “We can’t do it for them. … The United States is not simply
going to involve itself in a military action in the absence of a
political plan by the Iraqis that gives us some assurance that they’re
prepared to work together.”

JFK balanced his calls for Diem to reform with what sounded like a
promise that the South Vietnamese government would get U.S. aid no
matter what it did or failed to do: “I don’t agree with those who say we
should withdraw…. This is a very important struggle even though it is
far away. … We also have to participate — we may not like it — in the
defense of Asia.”

Obama sounded a similar note: “Given the nature of these terrorists,
it could pose a threat eventually to American interests as well. Iraq
needs additional support to break the momentum of extremist groups and
bolster the capabilities of Iraqi security forces. … They will have the
support of the United States. … We have enormous interests there.”

by David SuzukiPublished on Wednesday, June 4, 2014 by rabble.caJune
8 is World Oceans Day. It’s a fitting time to contemplate humanity’s
evolving relationship with the source of all life. For much of human
history, we’ve affected marine ecosystems primarily by what we’ve taken
out of the seas. The challenge as we encounter warming temperatures and
increasing industrial activity will be to manage what we put into them.

As
a top predator, humans from the tropics to the poles have harvested all
forms of marine life, from the smallest shrimp to the largest whales,
from the ocean’s surface to its floor. The staggering volume of fish
removed from our waters has had a ripple effect through all ocean
ecosystems. Yet the ocean continues to provide food for billions of
people, and improved fishing practices in many places, including Canada,
are leading to healthier marine-life populations. We’re slowly getting
better at managing what we catch to keep it within the ocean’s capacity
to replenish. But while we may be advancing in this battle, we’re losing
the war with climate change and pollution.

In the coming years,
our ties to the oceans will be defined by what we put into them: carbon
dioxide, nutrients washed from the land, diseases from aquaculture and land-based animals,
invasive species, plastics, contaminants, noise and ever-increasing
marine traffic. We once incorrectly viewed oceans as limitless
storehouses of marine bounty and places to dump our garbage; now it’s
clear they can only handle so much.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report
described how ingredients in the ocean’s broth are changing
dramatically. Life in the seas is closely linked to factors in the
immediate surroundings, such as temperature, acidity or pH, salinity,
oxygen and nutrient availability. These combine at microscopic levels to
create conditions that favour one form of life over another and emerge
into complex ecosystems.

The oceans now absorb one-quarter of the
atmosphere’s CO2. That’s bad news for organisms with calcium carbonate
shells that dissolve in acidic conditions. We’re witnessing the effects
of ocean acidification on shellfish along the West Coast of North America. Earlier this year, a Vancouver Island scallop farm closed
after losing 10 million scallops, likely because of climate change and
increasing acidity. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration has also linked oyster die-offs along the Pacific coast
to climate change.

While we may be getting better at figuring out
how to sustainably harvest crabs, lobsters and sea urchins, we’re just
starting to investigate whether they can even survive in oceans altered
by climate change.

Washington
is full of well-meaning types who want to help the poor. The list of
prospective helpers includes not only the standard liberal do-gooder
types talking about programs like pre-K education, but also
conservatives like Paul Ryan who argue that taking away food stamps and
other benefits will give low-income people the motivation they need to
go out and get a job.

While sincere efforts to help the poor
should be encouraged, we should also realize that our current economic
policies are doing much to harm the poor. First and foremost we should
realize that the decision to maintain high rates of unemployment is
having a devastating impact on the well-being of millions of low- and
moderate-income workers and their children.

The reasons are
straightforward. When the overall unemployment rate goes up, the rate
for the less-educated and minorities rises even more. This has been a
regular pattern in the data for many decades that has been very visible
in the current downturn.

Before the recession the overall
unemployment rate was at 4.5 percent. It peaked at 10.0 percent in the
fall of 2009 before gradually falling back to its current 6.3 percent.
By contrast, the unemployment rate for workers without high school
degrees rose from just over 7.0 percent in the months before the
recession to a peak of more than 15.0 percent in peak months in 2009 and
2010. This is an increase of 8.0 percentage points. The unemployment
rate for blacks rose from just over 8.0 percent before the recession to a
peak of more than 16.0 percent, also a rise of 8.0 percentage points.

High
unemployment doesn't just hurt those at the bottom by denying them
jobs, they also work fewer hours than they would like. The analysis in
my book with Jared Bernstein, Getting Back to Full Employment,
found that hours worked for families in the bottom fifth of the income
distribution increased by 17 percent in the boom at the end of the
1990s. By contrast, hours worked barely increased at all for those in
the top fifth.

And a lower unemployment rate means higher wages
for those at the bottom. We found that a sustained one percentage point
decline in the unemployment rate is associated with a 9.4 percent rise
in real wages. To summarize, for the poor, lower unemployment translates
into more jobs, more hours, and higher pay.

While the data on
these points may be clear, many people will question that having high
unemployment is a policy choice. That requires a little bit of thought.

At this point we havesolidevidence
that we can reduce the unemployment rate with increased government
spending or tax cuts targeted to those who would spend the money. We
have opted not to do so in order to reduce the deficit.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Chelsea Manning on the U.S. Military and Media Freedom

By Chelsea ManningJune 14, 2014

FORT
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — WHEN I chose to disclose classified information in
2010, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to
others. I’m now serving a sentence of 35 years in prison for these
unauthorized disclosures. I understand that my actions violated the law.

However,
the concerns that motivated me have not been resolved. As Iraq erupts
in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that
unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the
United States military controlled the media coverage of its long
involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits
on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for
Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.

If
you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq,
you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories
declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and
photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers.
The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in
creating a stable and democratic Iraq.

Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality.

Military
and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal
crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior
and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
Detainees were often tortured, or even killed.

Early
that year, I received orders to investigate 15 individuals whom the
federal police had arrested on suspicion of printing “anti-Iraqi
literature.” I learned that these individuals had absolutely no ties to
terrorism; they were publishing a scholarly critique of Mr. Maliki’s
administration. I forwarded this finding to the officer in command in
eastern Baghdad. He responded that he didn’t need this information;
instead, I should assist the federal police in locating more
“anti-Iraqi” print shops.

I
was shocked by our military’s complicity in the corruption of that
election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American
media’s radar.

It
was not the first (or the last) time I felt compelled to question the
way we conducted our mission in Iraq. We intelligence analysts, and the
officers to whom we reported, had access to a comprehensive overview of
the war that few others had. How could top-level decision makers say
that the American public, or even Congress, supported the conflict when
they didn’t have half the story?

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson